The Boat People by Sharon Bala

Author:Sharon Bala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

WHY ARE YOU HERE?

There was a voice mail on Grace’s BlackBerry. Keying in her password, she listened as she strode down the corridor, frowning when she heard her mother’s voice.

Our house is on the market, Kumi launched in without any preamble. Guess the price. Just guess! Grace, I need you to…

Grace fumed silently. Kumi must think she had nothing better to do all day than respond to her mother’s every whim. It wasn’t enough that she had the twins tangled up in her mission—the family history project, they all called it—Kumi wanted to rope Grace in too. As if Grace didn’t have evidence to parse and horror stories to sit through. Life-and-death decisions to make.

Grace was returning from a detention review. A widower with a small child in foster care. But he had also taken part in a suicide bombing. And he’d got jumpy when Singh brought up the agent. Did it mean something? I’m not a mind reader, Grace thought. And yet this job was all about being one, trying to guess at true motivations, to separate the deserving refugees from the ones who planned to use Canada as ground zero for a proxy war. She had denied the man’s detention release. There might already be grounds for deportation, but that was a decision for the admissibility hearing.

Back in the summer, when she was still new to the job, she had told herself she just needed to learn the ropes, that she’d be ready to adjudicate admissibility hearings when the time came. But the calendar had caught up to her and she was still flailing.

So far, they were hearing only women’s cases and she was deeming them admissible, setting her doubts aside and allowing the migrants to move on to the Refugee Board hearings. But in the new year, they would begin conducting the men’s cases too. Already she found the prospect nerve-racking.

Grace replayed the voice mail. We need to trace the ownership back, Kumi said. Let the imposters claim the house is theirs. I still have the original deed.

As if Grace was a real estate agent! Her mother had no idea. None. Grace had worked herself into a temper as she stalked back to her office, silently seething. Mitchell Hurst was charging down the hallway on a collision course. He had a funny way of walking, as if led by his forehead. A ram charging, horns out.

At her door, Grace pulled the keys from her pocket and kept her head bent. She and Mitchell had fallen into a pattern of lukewarm pleasantries, acknowledging the other only when it could not be avoided. But today, Grace didn’t think she could manage even that. We need to trace the ownership. We.

Ms. Nakamura. Mitchell came to a halt in front of her door.

Everyone else was Jill or Obi or Yee. She was the only one he addressed so officiously, as if he were the headmaster at a boarding school and she were a sixth-form girl. Be nice, she told herself.

Good afternoon, Mitchell.

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